Grimoire Groves Review — Time to Grow

Grimoire Groves is something of a combination of Hades and Stardew Valley. As a roguelite, it combines the familiar procedurally generated dungeon delving with a farming sim’s relationship building, resource harvesting, and, well, farming mechanics to create something that certainly stands out among its genre peers. While the game is undeniably unique, superbly charming, and clearly designed with a lot of care and love, I struggled to decide just how I felt about it until I had spent a lot of time with it. Suffice it to say that, befitting its gardening themes, Grimoire Groves is a game in which you have to give time to grow on you, and you might benefit from ignoring the first impression it gives you.

As I hinted at above, Grimoire Groves combines aspects of the roguelike genre with farming sims, particularly citing games like Hades and Stardew Valley as inspirations.

The way this translates into gameplay is actually pretty straightforward. Like most roguelite games, you have a little hub world where you can purchase upgrades using materials you find in the dungeons you delve into. In Grimoire Groves, these dungeons are the titular groves, a magical forest in a state of disrepair that needs your witchy touch to restore. To do so, you need to venture into the forest, cultivate its resources, and bring them back to your witchy conclave, where you will plant seeds and craft spells using the cultivated resources.

You’ll notice I said that your time in the roguelike procedurally generated dungeons of Grimoire Groves is spent “cultivating,” not fighting. This is kind of a half-truth, as Grimoire Groves doesn’t technically feature a combat system. Instead, the living plants you encounter in the groves are in need of feeding, which you do through your magic. This magic happens to come in the form of various spells that, technically, whittle down a “health” bar, but it’s all portrayed in a very friendly and whimsical way. Even the plants themselves just want to hug you, which will wear down your energy and put you to sleep.

That’s something players are going to notice immediately about Grimoire Groves: it’s absolutely freaking adorable, from its character designs right down to its nonviolent “combat” system. It’s something that I thought might bother me at first, but it grew on me pretty quickly, and I think is important for the game’s identity, which also seems to pull from media such as Adventure Time for its artistic direction.

Something else that needed to grow on me was the game’s general mechanics and gameplay loop.

When you start out in Grimoire Groves, things are unnecessarily slow. You are fighting the same enemy type over and over, who drop the same resource, and you get hard-locked from proceeding too far into the forest by gathering requirements you just can’t fulfill at first.

This is due in large part to how the gameplay loop works: in order to spawn new enemy types, you must first encounter a new enemy, harvest their seed, and then plant it in your garden, which turns that one-time encounter into a pretty frequent one. This is also how you gain access to new materials, including ones that you need to progress in the forest. Unfortunately, this takes some time, as these plants seem to just not want to spawn until you’ve been in and out of the forest quite a few times.

Once these new plants start to spawn, the game picks up really fast. The non-lethal combat system becomes much more interesting with the inclusion of more enemy types and new spells, as well as the ability to switch between different elements to more effectively subdue your plant assailants. The newfound access to materials you need to advance the game also helps the pacing quite a bit, and suddenly the game goes from what feels like semi-pointless excursions into the woods to having very specific, obtainable goals that you can knock out with a little attention to detail.

It doesn’t help that the game doesn’t allow you to store materials, something you have to kind of learn the hard way after messing up a few times. Everything you bring back from the forest, if not used on one of the many construction projects across your home, is turned into fertilizer the next time you enter the portal. Fertilizer, of course, is super useful in its own right as a kind of in-dungeon currency, but I think I would have felt better about it if I was able to hoard the flowers I needed to finish the construction of the projects I didn’t know I would be engaging with soon, as I had no clear idea where the other resources would be coming from.

Ultimately, Grimoire Groves is a pretty fun little game. It’s absolutely adorable, with a high-energy, friendly cast of cute characters and a very animated art style and world. Its flowery witchcraft themes put me off initially, but over time, I started to really like them. While the game didn’t present an incredible first impression with its slow start and initially limited access to mechanics, with some patience, the game can really open up to you, and over time I really began to enjoy everything it had to offer.

Try Hard Guides was provided a PC review copy for Grimoire Groves. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Grimoire Groves is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.